Jeff Lunsford flew fighter jets as a Navy pilot. So the analogy he used made sense when he was asked why he would leave the chief executive post at Limelight Networks — a publicly traded, $200 million software firm — to run Tealium, a small San Diego startup.

“I love the hyper-growth phase, when markets are being defined, when you’re in that land-grab mode with superfast product development,” said Lunsford. “It’s like flying an F-18 or flying a C-17 transport. I like the F-18.”

Founded in 2008, Tealium makes website tag management software, which helps in gathering reams of data that digital marketers want. The company employs about 90 workers and raised $10.5 million in venture capital last year from Battery Ventures.

Lunsford, 47, resigned from Limelight in November and joined Tealium last month. He didn’t come to the startup out of nowhere. He was an early investor in Tealium, having worked with its founders — Ali Behnam and Mike Anderson — at San Diego’s WebSideStory.

In fact, many of Tealium’s managers trace their roots back to WebSideStory, which went public in 2004 with Lunsford at the helm. The company was later sold to Omniture, which in turn was acquired by Adobe.

Lunsford left WebSideStory in 2006 to become CEO of Limelight Networks in Tempe, Ariz. He took that company public in 2007.

Tag management is a relatively new field. These days, websites are crowded with tags. Lunsford estimates there are 15 to 20 tags, on average. Sites heavy with tags sometimes load slowly — pushing away impatient users. In addition, managing tags is a hassle for a company’s information technology staff.

Tealium’s software, which is sold as a service subscription, lets marketing departments manage tags without involving their information technology colleagues. Tealium also speeds up website performance.

Tealium’s platform includes cloud-based products that gather all the information from various tags in one spot, allowing customers to more easily analyze the data. The company also has a mobile product, which gives app developers a window into how their apps are being used.

Lunsford recently spoke with U-T San Diego about the tag-management field and its prospects. Here are some excerpts.

Q: What is tag management?

A: A tag is a small piece of software that is inside a Web page’s software code. When invoked, it sends data back to some vendor.

That vendor could be an ad network, a Web analytics vendor, an affiliate network. It could be an email marketer. It could be a testing and targeting firm. Every website in this day and age has 15 to 20 tags on average.

Q: How are tags used?

A: Any company that is trying to draw people to their website is investing effort in email campaigns, ad campaigns, content marketing — so they need to understand the efficacy of those campaigns. The way they find that out is the ad network will tell them, ‘I sent you 30 people today.’ The email marketer will tell them, ‘You had 100 replies out of the 10,000 emails you sent yesterday.’ The way all these vendors know that is by tracking the tags in the website.